The Warning Signs Arrive Before the Sirens:

Scientists Found A Warning Sign Before Civil Wars - YouTube

Is America Sliding Into the "Anocracy Zone"?

A broadly sourced examination of what the civil-war forecasters actually measure—and where the United States now stands on their checklist.

By Pseudo Publius

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BLUF — Bottom Line Up Front

The scholarship that governments actually use to forecast political violence does not predict civil war from poverty, inequality, or ethnic diversity. It predicts it from a specific, measurable condition—anocracy, the unstable middle ground between settled democracy and settled autocracy—combined with political parties organized around identity rather than ideology. By that framework, the United States is now flashing several of the recognized early indicators at once: independent democracy indices record the steepest U.S. decline they have ever measured; confidence in Congress (9 percent), the presidency (27 percent), the Supreme Court (27 percent), and the criminal-justice system (17 percent) sits at or near record lows, and now rises and falls with which party holds power rather than resting on shared legitimacy; trust in elections has become reactive and partisan; the ideological center has hollowed out as partisans increasingly regard one another not as opponents but as enemies; Congress ranks among the least productive in a century, structurally rewarding those who preserve a grievance over those who broker a solution; and politically motivated attacks on public officials have risen more than threefold over the prior quarter-century. None of that is a forecast of civil war. The same body of research finds that most societies in the danger zone step back from the ledge, that large-scale civil war in the U.S. remains—by the assessment of many of the very scholars who study it—unlikely, and that solid majorities of Americans continue to reject political violence. The honest conclusion is narrower and more unsettling than either "it can't happen here" or "war is coming": the country has lost margin. The protections that absorb political shock are measurably thinner than they were a decade ago—and a low-margin system is precisely the kind that struggles to absorb a large, predictable shock, such as the automatic 23 percent Social Security benefit cut now scheduled to hit in 2033 absent congressional action. The indicators of that thinning show up long before any shooting starts. But the same research that maps the danger also maps the exits: recent large-scale experiments show that partisan hostility and even anti-democratic attitudes are malleable, and societies that reach the danger zone recover from it far more often than they fall. What restores faith is not mysterious—competent and transparent government, accountability applied visibly to one's own side, leaders who accept unfavorable results, and the correction of the badly inaccurate picture each side holds of the other.

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The finding nobody expected

Beginning in the 1990s, a U.S. government body called the Political Instability Task Force—an effort connected to the CIA and barred by law from analyzing the United States itself—set out to predict where in the world political instability and civil conflict would erupt. It fed dozens of variables into its models. The obvious candidates underperformed. Poverty was not the best predictor. Neither was income inequality, ethnic diversity, nor the brutality of a regime.

What surfaced instead was a condition political scientist Barbara F. Walter—a task-force member and the Rohr Professor of International Relations at the University of California, San Diego—describes in her 2022 book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them. The single strongest structural predictor was whether a country occupied the transitional middle of the standard democracy-to-autocracy scale. On the Polity index maintained by the Center for Systemic Peace, states run from +10 (full democracy) to −10 (full autocracy). Countries scoring roughly between +5 and −5 are anocracies: partial democracies where elections still occur but the rules are contested, power is concentrating, and institutions are losing the presumption of legitimacy. Settled democracies rarely descend into civil war. Settled autocracies rarely do either—they suppress dissent by force. The danger concentrates in the middle, and it rises fastest in countries moving toward or away from democracy rather than sitting still.

Walter pairs that first factor with a second: whether a country's political parties have organized primarily around race, religion, or ethnicity instead of policy. Where both conditions are present, she has estimated the annual risk of civil conflict at roughly 4 percent—compounding each year a country fails to reform. It is the movement, the scholars stress, not the snapshot, that carries the warning.

Where the U.S. now sits on the scale

The independent measures of American democratic health have moved sharply, and in one direction.

The V-Dem Institute at Sweden's University of Gothenburg—which assembles what is generally regarded as the largest global democracy dataset, drawing on thousands of country experts—downgraded the United States in its 2025 report from a "liberal democracy" to an "electoral democracy," and characterized the country as undergoing the fastest episode of autocratization in its modern history. Its 2026 report went further, describing the U.S. decline as "unprecedented" and listing the United States among the new wave of backsliding Western democracies alongside Italy and the United Kingdom.

Freedom House tells a parallel story. As summarized by the Pew Research Center in April 2026, the U.S. score fell to 81 out of 100 in 2025, down three points in a single year; the country routinely scored 90 or above through 2015 and has not recovered that level since. Over the two decades from 2005 to 2025, the United States lost more ground on that scale than nearly any other country Freedom House still classifies as "free."

Walter herself, applying the task-force method informally to her own country, dates the first U.S. slide into the anocracy zone to late 2020, followed by a partial recovery after the 2021 transfer of power. In interviews through 2025 she has argued the decline resumed and accelerated, projecting that the U.S. polity score for 2025 would land somewhere between +1 and +3—squarely inside the dangerous middle band—citing the speed of executive-power consolidation. Her own bottom line, stated years earlier, was that the country is closer to civil conflict than most Americans want to believe.

The collapse of the "referee"

The most concrete evidence the ordinary citizen can see is the erosion of institutional trust—and here the data are stark and current.

Gallup's July 2026 survey found average confidence across 14 core U.S. institutions stuck at 27 percent, one point above the all-time low and below 30 percent for a fifth consecutive year. Twelve of those 14 institutions sit at or near their lowest readings in more than three decades of measurement. Confidence in Congress stood at 9 percent; the presidency and the Supreme Court at 27 percent each; the criminal-justice system at 17 percent; newspapers at 17 percent; television news at 14 percent. Even the police, historically among the most trusted, drew the confidence of just 45 percent. Only small business, the military, and science still command majority confidence. In a separate global comparison, Gallup found Americans' trust in their own courts had fallen to a record-low 35 percent, setting the U.S. apart from peer wealthy nations where court trust generally remains a majority position.

But the number that matters most for the anocracy framework is not the level—it is the structure. Gallup's own analysts concluded that Americans no longer share a broad, stable faith in core institutions; instead, confidence now tracks who holds political power. In 2026 the partisan gap reached record width: Republicans expressed 74 percent confidence in the presidency versus 4 percent for Democrats—a 70-point chasm—with gaps of 45 points on the police, 46 on the military, and 40 on the Supreme Court. When trust in a referee rises and falls depending on whether your team is winning, the referee has stopped functioning as a referee. That is precisely the mechanism the civil-war literature flags: institutions built to absorb conflict—courts, legislatures, elections—stop being shock absorbers and become prizes each faction races to capture.

Elections: legitimacy on a partisan switch

The same reactive pattern now governs the most load-bearing institution of all. Tracking by the States United Democracy Center found that after the 2024 election, overall confidence in election integrity ticked up modestly—but the aggregate masked a partisan reversal: Republican confidence surged after their candidate won, while Democratic confidence fell, and those shifts persisted into 2025. This mirrors the collapse of Republican trust after 2020 amid the false "stolen election" narrative. The through-line, as election-integrity researchers describe it, is that a growing share of Americans across the spectrum treat electoral legitimacy as contingent on their side winning. In a healthy democracy, losing an election is a setback; in an anocracy, where the system is no longer presumed fair, losing begins to feel existential—and every contest becomes a fight over survival rather than policy.

The center empties out—and the opponent becomes the enemy

The civil-war literature attaches particular weight to a specific social shift: the moment ordinary partisans stop seeing the other side as fellow citizens who are wrong and start seeing them as enemies who are dangerous. When that happens, the moderate who reaches across the divide is recast as a traitor, the reward in politics flows to whoever sharpens the line rather than blurs it, and the center where compromise lives quietly empties out. The American data track that shift with unusual precision.

The phenomenon political scientists call affective polarization—dislike of the out-party rooted in identity rather than policy—has climbed steeply. Pew Research Center found that by 2022, 72 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of Democrats considered members of the opposing party more immoral than other Americans, up sharply from 47 and 35 percent in 2016. The long-running American National Election Studies "feeling thermometer" tells the same story in colder numbers: in 2000, roughly 8 percent of partisans rated the opposing party at absolute zero on a 100-point scale; by 2020, that share had jumped to about 40 percent, with 48 percent of Republicans and 39 percent of Democrats placing the other side at the very bottom. Pew has also found that large majorities believe voters for the opposing presidential candidate simply do not understand people like them.

This is precisely the "identity over ideology" condition Walter names as the second great risk multiplier—and it is compounded by the disappearance of the moderate legislator. The overlapping middle of Congress, where members of both parties once shared ideological ground and brokered deals, has thinned to near-nonexistence through decades of ideological sorting and primary pressure that punishes compromise. When the electoral incentive rewards the purist and endangers the deal-maker, the institutional machinery built to absorb conflict loses the very people who once operated it.

Governing by stalemate—when the problem is worth more than the solution

The consequence shows up in the raw output of the legislative branch. The 118th Congress (2023–2024) enacted 209 laws—the fewest in at least half a century, against a post-2000 average of roughly 372, according to National Archives and congressional data compiled by multiple trackers. The 119th Congress has run even slower by comparable measures. And the composition of what does pass is telling: analysts who examined the bills noted that the large majority were uncontroversial measures—renaming federal facilities, authorizing commemorative coins—while the marquee national problems stalled. The dysfunction has spilled into Congress's most basic duties, producing recurring shutdown brinkmanship, including a 43-day government shutdown in the fall of 2025.

The deeper pattern is the one the anocracy framework predicts. In a system where identity has swallowed policy and the opponent is an enemy, an unsolved problem is often more politically valuable than a solved one: the grievance mobilizes the base, fundraises, and fuels the next campaign, whereas a bipartisan solution requires handing the other side a share of the credit and surrendering a wedge. Leaders in that environment are rewarded for keeping the issue alive, not for retiring it. That is the mirror image of the "shock absorber" role a healthy legislature is supposed to play—and it leaves the country's hardest structural problems to compound untouched.

The predictable shock: Social Security's 2033 cliff

No single problem illustrates governing-by-stalemate—or the danger of a low-margin system—more concretely than Social Security. The program's 2025 Trustees Report, released June 18, 2025, projects that the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) trust fund will be depleted in 2033. At that point, absent congressional action, incoming payroll taxes would cover only 77 percent of scheduled benefits—an automatic, across-the-board 23 percent cut written into current law. If the retirement fund borrows from the disability fund, the combined trust funds run dry in 2034, yielding a still-severe roughly 19 percent cut. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that a typical couple retiring in the year of insolvency would lose about $16,500 in annual benefits; the program's 75-year shortfall now runs to roughly $25 trillion.

The remedies are neither mysterious nor numerous—some combination of higher payroll taxes, a higher earnings cap, a later retirement age, or reduced benefits—and lawmakers of both parties have understood the arithmetic for decades. What they have not done is act, because every fix inflicts visible pain on a powerful constituency, and in a polarized system the party that moves first absorbs the blame. It is the archetypal case of a problem that is politically safer left unsolved.

This is why it belongs in a discussion of anocracy. The forecasting research does not claim the danger zone causes collapse; it claims the danger zone strips away a society's margin to absorb shocks. A dated, automatic 23 percent cut to the nation's most popular and load-bearing federal program—landing on tens of millions of retirees who vote at the highest rates—is exactly the kind of high-stakes, legitimacy-shredding shock a resilient democracy metabolizes and a hollowed-out one may not. Whether 2033 becomes a tripping point or a forcing function for overdue reform will depend on whether the center that is supposed to solve it still exists by then.

The violence indicator—and its limits

Political violence is not an early warning sign; by the time it arrives, the earlier erosion has already done its work. But its recent trajectory in the United States is measurable and steep.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies documented 25 attacks and plots between 2016 and 2025 targeting elected officials, candidates, judges, and government staff over partisan extremist motives—against just two such incidents in the preceding two-plus decades. Politically motivated attacks on government figures in the last five years alone, CSIS found, more than tripled the total of the previous 25 years combined.

The recent record is grimly concrete: two assassination attempts against Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign, including the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally shooting; the April 2025 arson at Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro's official residence during Passover; the fatal May 2025 shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington; the June 14, 2025, assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the wounding of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette; and the September 10, 2025, assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University. The aftermath of the Kirk killing produced its own troubling sequence—a wave of firings, disciplinary actions, and a federal push against speech deemed to celebrate the violence—illustrating how quickly a single act can escalate into contests over who may speak. Which "side" bears more responsibility for the killings remains itself a partisan battleground; researchers who track extremist violence have noted that a disproportionate share of recent political killings traces to right-wing perpetrators, a framing the administration disputed.

Yet the survey evidence complicates any simple story of a nation lusting for violence. The nonpartisan UC Davis longitudinal studies published in Injury Epidemiology found that support for, and personal willingness to engage in, political violence stayed largely stable from 2022 through mid-2025—and remained a minority position throughout. The Public Religion Research Institute's January 2026 survey found that 67 percent of Americans believe violence is becoming more of a problem in politics, even as strong majorities reject it outright; PRRI has repeatedly found that Americans overestimate how much their opponents endorse violence. The genuinely worrying signal within that data is narrower: among Americans aged 18–29, agreement that "true American patriots may have to resort to violence" has hovered between roughly 17 and 27 percent since 2021, with an uptick in December 2025.

The case for resilience

None of the above amounts to a prophecy, and a substantial body of serious analysis argues against the civil-war framing.

CSIS, in an October 2025 assessment, concluded flatly that the United States is not headed toward a second civil war in the classic sense—an organized, years-long armed conflict between the government and a rebel force claiming thousands of lives—while acknowledging the real and rising threat of episodic violence. Harvard's Jay Ulfelder and others have argued that America's wealth, institutional depth, professional and apolitical military, federal structure, and lack of a clean territorial fault line make a 1861-style rupture implausible. A 2024 study in Administration & Society comparing today's social psychology to the 1850s found striking parallels—but concluded civil war remains "increasingly plausible, if still unlikely," with the more probable trajectory being sustained civil strife, gridlock, and administrative dysfunction rather than open war.

Walter's own work carries the same caveat that tends to get lost in the alarming headlines: societies step back from this ledge far more often than they fall off it. The countries in real danger, she notes, are frequently the ones that believe they are fine—because the early stages of the pattern do not feel like history. They feel like an unusually tense decade.

What can be done to restore faith

The most important feature of the forecasting research is easily missed: because faith in a system collapses through identifiable mechanisms, it can be rebuilt by reversing them. And the single most encouraging finding in the recent literature is that the underlying attitudes are not fixed.

Consider the evidence that they are movable. In 2024, researchers from Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and other institutions published in Science the results of the largest experiment of its kind—a "megastudy" of roughly 32,000 Americans testing 25 short interventions designed to reduce partisan hostility and anti-democratic attitudes. Twenty-three of the 25 reduced partisan animosity, some by the equivalent of eight years of polarization growth; six reduced support for undemocratic practices, and five reduced support for partisan violence—several working in a matter of minutes. But the study carried an essential caveat that should discipline any serious effort: the interventions that make partisans warmer toward the other side are largely not the same ones that make them less willing to break democratic rules. Warmth and democratic commitment are separate levers. What most reduced anti-democratic attitudes was correcting people's misperceptions of what rival partisans actually believe. That finding is decisive, because—as the PRRI and UC Davis surveys cited above repeatedly document—Americans dramatically overestimate how much the other side endorses cheating and violence. A large share of the mutual dread driving the spiral rests on a false portrait of the enemy. Correcting that portrait is cheap, scalable, and among the highest-leverage moves available, and it explains why "civility" campaigns that chase warmth rather than accuracy so often disappoint.

Rebuilding the institutional "referee" is the second half. Here the comparative evidence is unusually convergent. The OECD, which now surveys public trust across dozens of democracies, finds it resting on five measurable drivers: reliability, responsiveness, integrity, openness, and fairness. In plainer terms, institutions earn back trust by delivering—competent, fair, transparent performance—and by visible accountability. One finding bears directly on the American predicament: research indicates that the perception of corruption, not merely its actual incidence, drives trust erosion, which means proactive transparency and publicized consequences do real work. And the version of accountability that actually restores legitimacy is a faction holding its own side to account, not merely the other. A referee is trusted only when it is seen to call fouls against the home team.

The structural reforms aim at the incentives that emptied the center. Walter's own prescription is deliberately unglamorous: bolster the rule of law, guarantee all citizens equal access to the vote, and improve the quality of everyday government services—on the theory that people who experience government as fair and functional stop reaching for the exits. Because the hollow middle is a product of incentives—primaries and safe districts reward purists and endanger deal-makers—the reforms aimed at it include nonpartisan redistricting, open or top-two primaries, and ranked-choice voting. Intellectual honesty requires a caveat here: the evidence that these measures specifically reduce polarization is mixed and genuinely contested, so they are better defended as ways to widen who can win than as guaranteed depolarizers. The more robust structural point concerns stakes. The more power becomes winner-take-all and unconstrained, the more every election feels existential; restoring guardrails, checks, and power-sharing norms lowers the temperature precisely because it makes losing survivable.

The decisive lever, and the hardest, is elite behavior. The civil-war literature is blunt that escalation is driven from the top—by leaders who indulge extremists, cast opponents as enemies, and question results when they lose. The move that actually breaks the cycle is the costly one: leaders accepting unfavorable outcomes and condemning violence and rule-breaking by their own side, credible precisely because it costs them something. This is also where the Social Security cliff turns from threat into opportunity. A genuine bipartisan solvency fix before 2033 would do more than avert a benefit shock; it would be a public proof-of-concept that the system can still solve a hard, painful problem—converting a looming legitimacy crisis into a demonstration of competence. Delivery is itself an act of trust-building.

Finally, faith is rebuilt retail as much as wholesale, and the citizen is not a bystander. The evidence points to unglamorous, individual habits: cross-partisan contact, actively correcting one's own misperceptions of the other side, supporting bridging organizations, engaging at the local level—where trust remains markedly higher than in Washington—voting in the primaries where the purist dynamic is strongest, and rewarding problem-solvers over grievance-entrepreneurs at the ballot box.

Bottom line

Read against the forecasters' actual checklist, the United States in mid-2026 is not a country on the brink of Fort Sumter. It is a country that has lost margin. The structural indicators the Political Instability Task Force learned to watch—a partial democracy sliding through the middle zone, institutions whose legitimacy now depends on partisan control, elections treated as legitimate only when your side prevails, an emptied center where opponents are treated as enemies, a legislature that rewards preserving grievances over solving problems, and a measurable rise in political violence—are present simultaneously, and several are worsening rather than stabilizing. Layered on top is a dated, predictable fiscal shock—the 2033 Social Security cliff—of exactly the kind a low-margin system is least equipped to absorb.

The most disturbing implication of the research is not that collapse is imminent. It is that the conditions preceding the worst outcomes never feel like a crisis while they are forming. The shops stay open, the schools function, the courts still issue rulings. The warning signs are quiet, measurable things—trust, legitimacy, the shared willingness to accept an unfavorable result—and they wear thin long before any siren sounds. The societies that survive, Walter argues, are the ones still alert enough to be arguing about the danger. On the current evidence, the United States is at least still arguing.

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Verified Sources

1. Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them (Crown, 2022). Overview and thesis: Wikipedia summary, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Civil_Wars_Start
2. Barbara F. Walter, "Why we should worry about the U.S. becoming an anocracy," The Washington Post, Jan. 24, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/24/why-should-we-worry-that-us-could-become-an-anocracy-again-because-threat-civil-war/
3. KPBS Public Media, "San Diego political expert details steps that could lead to US civil war" (interview with Barbara Walter), July 9, 2025, https://www.kpbs.org/news/politics/2025/07/09/san-diego-political-expert-details-steps-that-could-lead-to-us-civil-war
4. UC San Diego School of Global Policy & Strategy (GPS News), "America might not be a democracy for much longer," Dec. 9, 2025 (Walter's projected 2025 polity score of +1 to +3), https://gpsnews.ucsd.edu/united-states-authoritarianism/
5. V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, "Democratic backsliding reaches Western democracies, with U.S. decline 'unprecedented'" (2026 Democracy Report press release), Mar. 17, 2026, https://www.v-dem.net/news/press-release-democratic-backsliding-reaches-western-democracies-with-us-decline-unprecedented/
6. V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2026: Unraveling the Democratic Era? (10th ed.), https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy_Report_2026_lowres.pdf
7. V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2025: 25 Years of Autocratization – Democracy Trumped?, https://www.v-dem.net/documents/60/V-dem-dr__2025_lowres.pdf
8. Pew Research Center, "Multiple indicators show a decline in the health of America's democracy in 2025," Apr. 15, 2026 (Freedom House score 81; V-Dem downgrade), https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/15/multiple-indicators-show-a-decline-in-the-health-of-americas-democracy-in-2025/
9. Gallup, Lydia Saad, "Confidence in U.S. Institutions Remains Near All-Time Low," July 14, 2026 (institutional confidence figures; record partisan gaps), https://news.gallup.com/poll/712436/confidence-institutions-remains-near-time-low.aspx
10. Gallup, "Americans Pass Judgment on Their Courts," Mar. 28, 2025 (record-low 35% judicial confidence), https://news.gallup.com/poll/653897/americans-pass-judgment-courts.aspx
11. States United Democracy Center, "Tracking Attitudes About Voters' Confidence in Elections," updated Oct. 27, 2025 (partisan reversal in election confidence after 2024), https://statesunited.org/resources/confidence-poll/
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16. UC Davis Health, "Attitudes toward political violence remain steady, according to new study," June 2026, https://health.ucdavis.edu/research/news/headlines/attitudes-toward-political-violence-remain-steady-according-to-new-study/2026/06
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27. Newsweek, "Has the 119th Congress Been One of the Least Productive Ever?" July 24, 2025, https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-least-productive-congress-laws-2102819
28. Social Security Administration, Board of Trustees press release, "Projection for Combined Trust Funds One Year Sooner than Last Year" (OASI depletion 2033; 77% of benefits payable), June 18, 2025, https://www.ssa.gov/news/en/press/releases/2025-06-18.html
29. Social Security Administration, "A Summary of the 2025 Annual Reports" (Trustees Report summary), https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/2025/index.html
30. Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, "Analysis of the 2025 Social Security Trustees' Report" (23% automatic cut; ~$16,500 annual loss for a typical retiring couple), June 18, 2025, https://www.crfb.org/papers/analysis-2025-social-security-trustees-report
31. Bipartisan Policy Center, "2025 Social Security Trustees Report Explained" (~$25 trillion 75-year shortfall), Nov. 19, 2025, https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/2025-social-security-trustees-report-explained/
32. Jan G. Voelkel, Robb Willer, et al., "Megastudy testing 25 treatments to reduce antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity," Science 386, no. 6719 (Oct. 18, 2024), https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh4764
33. Strengthening Democracy Challenge / Civic Health Project, results summary (23 of 25 interventions reduced partisan animosity), https://www.civichealthproject.org/projects/strengthening-democracy-challenge
34. OECD, "Building Trust to Reinforce Democracy" and the OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions (five drivers: reliability, responsiveness, integrity, openness, fairness), https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/trust-in-government.html
35. Frontiers in Political Science, "The price of accountability: corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies" (perceived corruption drives trust erosion), Feb. 2026, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2026.1779810/full
36. Barbara F. Walter's prescriptions ("bolster the rule of law, give all citizens equal access to the vote, and improve the quality of government services"), as discussed in America Magazine, "Predicting (and preventing) the next civil war," Oct. 13, 2022, https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2022/10/13/review-walter-jacobs-civil-war-243912/

Note on method: Figures for institutional confidence, democracy indices, and political-violence attitudes are drawn from the primary polling releases and research reports cited above. Assessments of overall civil-war likelihood are contested among specialists; this article presents both the elevated-risk analysis (Walter, V-Dem) and the skeptical/resilience analysis (CSIS, Ulfelder, Van Wart et al.) rather than adjudicating between them.